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CRM with blocked email...

I have to make a stand here as I can not quietly sit and abide the use of the term AI when we mean Automation.

Companies like Conversica are NOT building Artificial Intelligence. They are building email automation. The same way anyone can do inside of any ESP or even their own CRM.

They are not building a version of IBM's Watson as much as they are modeling their software after Hubspot.


Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence exhibited by machines. In computer science, an ideal "intelligent" machine is a flexible rational agent that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of success at some goal.

Marketing automation refers to software platforms and technologies designed for marketing departments and organizations to more effectively market on multiple channels online (such as email, social media, websites, etc.) and automate repetitive tasks like email follow up.
 
You may not know about improvements in the market in the AI arena so I feel I must let you know. I know there is some negativity about AI and this is still a little kept secret out there. Ready.....Artificial Intelligence is built into the CRM. What does that mean to you? Based on what does or doesn't happen in the CRM from your team, the AI detects and can fire off communication. No more shutting AI down manually to eliminate "double talk". She can detect negativity and fire herself. She can even detect Text Opt in and text the customer moving forward. AI can correct information like phone numbers and emails to the profile. Many sales people don't do that. LOL There is a lot of room for growth in this area. Just wait and see.
 
@Chris The AI engine does go above and beyond basic triggers. We've seen the template driven triggers coming from other systems that aren't responsive to what is and isn't working. The system actually reads the sentiment and entities in an incoming message to determine the best way to respond to a customer. Watching how the customer responds in a positive or negative way, the generated responses will change over time at any given dealership as the machine continues to learn the best way to engage with their customers. The big difference here is machine is the one figuring out what works and what doesn't work by itself. Language can change from formal to casual or vice versa. The weather, the season, the vehicle, the region, the time of day - everything is in play here to figure out the best way to talk to each customer. With us it isn't just a simple decision tree to find a template to send. We're still just scratching the surface of true AI, but there is definitely some true machine learning here!
 
I'm a little late with this post but it might help someone next time.

@BillH - here are a couple random thoughts that I don't think have been mentioned yet.

One easy was to document whether your CRM (or the CRM you are considering) is having deliverability issues is to look at their senderscore.org rating. Find the ip address from an email sent from the crm (it is in your email header), create a free account at SenderScore.org, and then plug the ip address in. It will show you how many spam traps the ip has sent to in the last 7 days as well as the sender's email reputation score. That gives you a rating to discuss with your CRM rep.

Rotating ip addresses doesn't work as email companies such as yahoo, gmail, etc., are looking at consistent good behavior from an ip when determining whether or not to deliver your email to the inbox.

If you should decide to switch CRMs, make sure you export your suppression list (list of bad emails/opt-outs) from your old CRM. Not all CRMs handle suppressions the same way. Some will disable an email address if it is bad so it can't be sent to, others maintain a suppression list so the email send goes out > caught by the suppression list > before it leaves the server. The later type of CRM are a problem as exporting your list gives you everyone and once you send from your new CRM, you'll inadvertently send a lot of bad emails which will hurt your sender reputation at the new CRM.

Ideally the CRMs need to do 2 things:

1. Give you access to reports that allow you to identify your customer engagement. If you've been sending emails to someone who hasn't opened an email from you in a year or so, it's safe to assume that you have their junk email address and your message is going into a yahoo account with 20,000 other unopened emails. Over the years, if you build up enough of these bad/low engagement emails and sprinkle in a dose of spam complaints, it results in a bad email reputation which then leads to email deliverability issues.

Being able to identify engagement would enable you to clean out the inactive/bad emails which will definitely help deliverability.

2. Give people an option to use a dedicated ip just for their account so they are not impacted by other sender reputations.

Other CRMs like salesforce, infusionsoft, automatically monitor your sender engagement and if your emails have opted-in, are getting opened/clicked, then you'll find your emails are getting sent from their servers with better IP reputations. Mailchimp does the same thing.
 
GREAT advice from @1to1News !! Thanks for stopping by Malinda. We miss your participation.

I'm not sure of the CRM in question but I just did this with our CRM here at MBH. I looked at several one to one communication emails going out from the CRM and then I looked at several email campaigns sent out over the last few months. I ran these IP's through Sender Score - where is what was returned...

*There could be more IP's (I'm guessing there are) but these are the ones I found.

Two different IP's being used for one to one email communications...

one2onecom_1.png

one2onecom_2.png

Two different IP's being used through the Campaign Manager for sending larger email campaigns...

campaignemail_1.png

campaignemail_2.png
 
GREAT advice from @1to1News !! Thanks for stopping by Malinda. We miss your participation.

I'm not sure of the CRM in question but I just did this with our CRM here at MBH. I looked at several one to one communication emails going out from the CRM and then I looked at several email campaigns sent out over the last few months. I ran these IP's through Sender Score - where is what was returned...

*There could be more IP's (I'm guessing there are) but these are the ones I found.

Two different IP's being used for one to one email communications...

That is the one that we had issues with here.

What site are you using for the spam checks?
 
I'm a little late with this post but it might help someone next time.

@BillH - here are a couple random thoughts that I don't think have been mentioned yet.

One easy was to document whether your CRM (or the CRM you are considering) is having deliverability issues is to look at their senderscore.org rating. Find the ip address from an email sent from the crm (it is in your email header), create a free account at SenderScore.org, and then plug the ip address in. It will show you how many spam traps the ip has sent to in the last 7 days as well as the sender's email reputation score. That gives you a rating to discuss with......


This is great stuff, thank you for the insights! -Bill